ITBadger

BioStore have been in place at our place since July 2016. I've gone from having loads of issues under Cunningham's to none whatsoever under FasTrak (Biostore's cashless system). I cannot fault it at all.

We used to use School Asset Manager but have migrated to a Google Sheet which is as adaptable as we want to make it now. As long as you have the asset stickers to identify your products then you could do the same. Just make sure taht it's backed up and that you can extract the information that you need from it. We also video each room and upload the videos to Google Drive then link to the videos from our Google Sheet. Does everything that we used to use SAM for and is far easier to use.

We've been working with Senso in ironing out a couple of issues. Thankfully they have been focussing on making sure that the core product is rock solid at the expense of rushing out new modules. For this reason they are a little behind where they anticipated being last year when they published their roadmap. From our perspective it is getting better all the time and I know from experience how much time and effort the guys are putting into supporting the product. I'm glad to hear that Impero are upping their game, but I would still encourage anyone in the market for a solution to at least try Senso. I do believe that they will be at BETT next week, so go and have a look at what they have been doing.

I can recommend BioStore FasTrak. Modern, responsive and with great support. Like a breath of fresh air after Cunningham's.

I found the same as you @DaveP. Might set the first one as a screensaver in one of the IT rooms.

Love it. Does anyone know where we can get the video file? i'd love to put it on our digital signage!

The base price is £25 per student but we have a 20% discount for being a PIXL school. They are quite transparent with their discount structure, so if any of you are already using the product and have a referral code then we could get a further 10% off. I'm not sure what incentive they offer the school making the referral. Interestingly, if any of you work at a PIXL TRIP (PRU / DSEN) school you can get a 100% discount. In terms of the pricing difference across the three years, the total works out at the same amount per student (£20 for Y11; £10 per year for Y10 and £6.67 per year for Y9). Thanks all for your responses.

Afternoon all. Has anyone had any experience is using Tassomai? Any thoughts, positive or negative? What do your staff and students think of it, are they good to their word of giving refunds if students don't pass, and are there any technical pitfalls to be aware of? Thanks in advance for your responses.

Have you considered using Team Drives to prevent this issue? That, at least keeps the files under the ownership of the organisation. It also seems as though there is a training need with your staff, as there was with mine when we started using Google Drive. They need to understand that Shared With Me isn't a very good location to 'store' files and aslo to understand the difference between copying a file and clicking 'add to my drive'. Sorry if i'm teaching you to suck eggs, but getting the basics right from the beginning will prevent a lot of confusion, and potentially lost files down the line.

We migrated from Exchange to G-Mail last summer and it was almost entirely painless. Far easier than i'd imagined. Having started off down the Google path some years ago I cannot really comment on how today's O365 compares, but I know that @FN-GM made the switch to Google and seems happy that he did so. He's no fool either so it must be good!

I installed it over the summer in my back garden. The preparation is key, don't rush and buy the best grass that you can afford. Most companies will send you samples so you can feel what the finished result looks like. My kids love it, it means they can use the garden far more than they used to be able to. The wife loves it as it means that she doesn't need to nag me to mow the lawn and the kids don't tread mud into the house, and I love it as the wife doesn't nag me!

How many schools have already appointed a DPO or have restructured their staffing to allow for one? Wouldn't it be in our interests to have this role lie within the LEA / MAT and for this person to audit our procedures and advise on what we need to do as a school to become compliant? Obviously we as techies would need to feed into this process, but as previously stated we cannot be the DPO as we are data controllers. Furthermore, we don't have the money to employ someone with specialist knowledge.

Thanks for that, I've passed the details on to our science techs.

I'm interested in how other people do this. I too add a room to a class to achieve the desired result, but see inconsistencies in SIMS. If you look at the teacher's timeline, then it shows two instances for each lesson, one in each room. Similarly, if you browse to a member of staff and then view their timetable you see a red square with a number '2' on each period that has two rooms assigned to it. If you click on this you see two instances of the class. My problem comes from the fact that PARS, which we use for mobile registration amongst other things, won't treat these sessions as double lessons meaning that a teacher has to take a register twice. I'm interested to know if other schools have alternative methods to add additional rooms that would solve this problem for us.

Hue HD cameras are popular with staff at our place. Dead easy to use and install and portable too should the need arise. https://huehd.com/

Hi Jen, Not completely sure that this is appropriate as I don't deal with 6th form timetabling, but it sounds as though this is something that Alternative Curriculum could be useful for. You can create a category / lesson and assign Teachers and Rooms to it then assign the students that you want to remove from the original block to the alternative lesson using Curriculum Assignment by Student in SIMS. Sorry if i've got the wrong end of the stick, but that is how I deal with similar issues in KS3&4. Dave.

If there's still some going i'd be interested as we do like to get busy with the iron on things from pen drives to guitar pickups. Anything that staff have broken / sat on basically!

It used to be 'CONNECTmeNOW!' or something similar but ours has been updated and does not grant access with that password. I'm going down the factory reset route (hold both buttons then release restart whilst continuing to hold the connect button). This should reset the unit to default. Other Axis camera models that I have come across have a default password of 'pass' for the root login. Hope that helps, let me know if you have found another way of getting in please.

I seem to be able to approve and remove approval from videos as normal here.

Likewise.Thanks to all for sharing your experiences. It helps to know that others have the problem too sometimes!

If the software that you are using exports to an SPL file then you could try loading that in NovaT6. That would provide a path to get the timetable to SIMS. I'd be careful to ensure that you have verified backups before you start though.

Could well be living it up at ITSE this week. Couldn't quite get our school to approve the travel expenses for me to go!

Only a matter of time until Disney produce The Ewoks vs Paddington now.

Hi, as @fiza mentioned I've completed the Google Certified Administrator course twice now (accreditation lasts for two years). The online course that Google provides at its training centre website prepares you well, but its important to get some experience of using it in your own environment. The exam is a three hour session that provides a number of scenarios that you are tasked with resolving on a dummy G-Suite domain. I've also completed the Educator Level 1 & 2 certifications which were useful for seeing how Google envisions educators using its platform. The cost for the Administrator course was 100 dollars, the L1 educator course is 10 dollars and the L2 educator course is 25 dollars. If you need any more info then feel free to get in touch.

We aren't with LGfL. I don't believe that it is down to filtering or ISP as we have staff with the same issue from home. It seems to be something janky (good word BTW) with Google's settings. I've tried throwing a few switches in the Admin Panel but to no avail.